FreeBSD Archive

We've all heard the age old argument second only to the vi vs. emacs religious wars: FreeBSD Vs Linux. As a long time linux user, I decided that is was time I spent some time on the other side of the fence to see if it was any greener. Oh, and by the way, vi rules.

I've been using computers since I was quite young and have been using Unixlike OSes for about two years. Most of my life I've used Macs and only started using Windows and Unixlike OSes recently for programming. I'm good at learning OSes as long as they are documented. I've been using FreeBSD for about a year and a half.

Robert Watson posted another bi-weekly version of the FreeBSD 5.2 open issues list, slightly restructured. At this time, there are four "show stopper defects" listed: panics when building ata-raid arrays, ATAng crashdump causes disk corruption, pipe/VM corruption on Alpha, and lingering PSE instability. There are only 5 issues left of on the "required features" list: KSE support for sparc64, KSE support for alpha, Fine-grained network stack locking without Giant, MAC framework devfs path fixes, and ACL_MASK override of umask support in UFS.

Free UNIX-derived operating systems have traditionally have a simplistic approach to process synchronization which is unsuited to multiprocessor application. Initial FreeBSD SMP support kept this approach by allowing only one process to run in kernel mode at any time, and also blocked interrupts across multiple processors, causing seriously suboptimal performance of I/O bound systems. This paper describes the work done to remove this bottleneck, paying particular attention to the project management aspects and the particular challenges of a large open source development project.

FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 is now available for testing from here. Mirrors to be synced shortly.

If you haven't read part 1 of this -- "Babe in the Woods: A Linux User Migrates to FreeBSD" -- you may be at a loss. For those who did read it, many are still at a loss. That is, they didn't grasp the subtle purpose behind the article. Of those who commented, most were hardcore geeks, the techies who are in a position to really understand computers. Find out how Ed is doing in FreeBSD these days at OfB.biz.

There's a review of FreeBSD 5.1 at The Jem Report. It's a comprehensive review and offers a quick comparison with GNU/Linux.

Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major free BSD variants. Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Find out at OfB.biz.

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems.

BSDForums.org features the latest news about BSD: FreeBSD's Luigi Rizzo has made some changes to the ipfw code so it can forward packets also when acting as a bridge. Lennart Augustsson says that there's been a long standing problem with some USB printers running in bidirectional mode on NetBSD. An article by Miod Vallat describes how the m88k-specific backend of the GNU C compiler, gcc, was fixed, from the discovery and analysis of the problems to the real fixing work.

Poul-Henning Kamp has uploaded his paper about the new GEOM-based disk encryption service in FreeBSD, which is a good read for everyone with an interest in information security and encryption.

FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely has put together a 4.9-BETA ISO image for i386 with the latest package build.

A common security breach involves exploiting one application to gain access to another. Keeping separate applications separate can limit the potential damage. Mike DeGraw-Bertsch explains how FreeBSD's jails can help secure necessary applications. On other FreeBSD news, a specific schedule for the release of FreeBSD 4.9 is now available.

No more hours of compiling! Binary distributions of Java on FreeBSD are finally here. The FreeBSD Foundation today announced the availability of a binary distribution of the Java JDK version 1.3.1 for the widely used FreeBSD operating system.Wes Peters of the FreeBSD Core Team commented "This announcement hallmarks a new era of Java support for FreeBSD. Having easy to install binary Java packages will ensure that all users can enjoy the benefits of Java technology on the FreeBSD platform."